Tiny glimpse of big top

Sunday

Jan 27, 2008 at 12:01 AMJan 27, 2008 at 2:18 AM

In 1903, the Barnum and Bailey Circus - the Greatest Show on Earth - was back in the United States after a five-year tour of Europe. The flamboyant owners spared no expense in parading their production's magnificence. The ornate Two Hemispheres Bandwagon was pulled through the streets by 40 dappled gray horses. That circus parade must have been quite a sight.You can see a scale model of the 40-horsepower wagon in the library at Davis Health Care Center. It's part of the Pilot Brothers Circus and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, which is what Ben Edwards calls his collection of hand-made miniature circus wagons. He just finished crafting the 200th addition to that collection.Most of the wagons and horses in the two display cases are done in a 1:87 ratio, meaning one model inch equals 87 inches of real life, if life under the big top can be called real life. That's the HO scale popular with model railroaders, another of Edwards' hobbies.Edwards, 70, has been hooked on circuses since he was 4, when his father took him to Atlanta's Highland Avenue to watch as the circus animals were unloaded from a train.Edwards grew up in Atlanta and went to Georgia Tech, studying engineering and physics. It was perfect preparation for his first job, selling Nestle chocolates to grocery stories in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and South Carolina.In the 1970s he moved to Charlotte and began wholesaling wine. He moved to Wilmington in 1974 to become sales manager for Hanks Distributing Co., handling beer and wine. He married Mary in 1976, after proposing to her during a public address at a Boy Scouts' event.It took her two weeks to say yes, he said. She just smiles when she hears the story.Edwards has a lot of stories to relate. He spent the last decades of his career as a construction superintendent for Luther T. Rogers Inc., finally using that engineering knowledge. As we talked, Edwards called out, "Tighten up" to friends passing by, the universal building-site exhortation to work harder.Edwards says he has returned from the dead 23 times since his first heart attack in November 1994.His first out-of-body experience came just after that incident, when he was in the catheter lab at New Hanover Regional Medical Center, near the emergency room. He said that when he woke back up he asked the nurse, "How is so-and-so? She's loose."The nurse went to the emergency room to check, returned and told him, "She's fine. She did die, but she's back now."He said he encountered her "when I was wandering around the ceiling, and I told her to get back," he recalled. "I said, 'It's not your time, you've got kids waiting on you.'"He said he knew the emergency room patient's name even though he had never met her - at least on this plane of existence.His father, who worked for The Associated Press, was in a clown group associated with a Shrine Temple in Atlanta. He met famous clowns who came to visit.Most of his wagons date to within a couple of decades of the turn of the last century. There were few paved roads then, and it was a big deal when the circus came to town. Before many zoos, circuses brought the only chance to see exotic animals like camels and elephants.Maybe it's those 23 crossings to the Other Side, but Edwards has little use for the limitations of time and extinction. One of his wagons is drawn by two elephants of extinct varieties. And he has an animal wagon that depicts a living, if tiny, specimen of the extinct giant ground sloth, a replica of whose skeleton stands guard at the Cape Fear Museum. His miniatures were displayed at the museum in 2005 and 2006.Tiny onlookers to his Pilot Brothers circus parade include Harry Potter, Shrek and some famous ringmasters and clowns from circus history.Why Pilot Brothers?Pilot comes from "pile it." When his father was young and the circus came to Milledgeville, Ga., he'd go seek work at the circus to pay for tickets. Sometimes that work involved shoveling.Edwards said around the end of February, he'll swap out the circus bandwagons and calliope wagons for traveling animal cages.Drop by and see it. It's worth the trip.Si Cantwell covers the people and places that make Southeastern North Carolina unique. Contact him at 343-2364 or Si.Cantwell@StarNewsOnline.com.

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